鉈あげて きらんとすれば 木の芽かな nata agete kiran to sureba konome kana shiki 子規 Lifting up the hatchet, To cut it down, It was budding

Lifting up the hatchet,
To cut it down,
It was budding

鉈あげてきらんとすれば木の芽かな (nata agete kiran to sureba konome kana): hatchet raised, about to cut, and there, the buds.

Masaoka Shiki's verse is a hand that stops. The hatchet is raised and the cut is coming. Then the buds on the tree are seen, and the blade does not come down. Readers have taken it as the tenderness of mind that haiku shows, perhaps a little too plainly.

In the Japanese, きらんとすれば is about to cut, when: the moment of seeing sits in that turn. 木の芽, konome, is the new growth breaking from a tree, a spring season word. The hands end the verse two ways, 哉 on some and かな on others, and the two are one word.

Translation by R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume Four: Autumn-Winter (1952), Preface, page vii.

Shiki entered the verse among his verses of 1893 in 寒山落木, the manuscript collection of his own haiku, and it was first printed in 1924, in the first volume of his collected works.

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